Decision making

By pl 45 Comments

7 Beliefs You Shouldn’t Believe…

Suppose you knew exactly what to do to reach your goals, whatever they were.

Maybe grow your profits 27%, maybe lose 36 pounds, maybe change your life… Whatever.

You had a plan and you worked out the steps, but you weren’t taking the actions necessary to get anywhere.

What do you think would happen?

Duh… Nothing.

Of course, nothing would happen, because you weren’t doing anything. How could it possibly be any different?

But that doesn’t make any sense…

You knew what to do but weren’t doing it? Why not? That’s never happened, has it?

Well it may NOT make any sense, but for a lot of people this happens every single day.

Here’s why:

When you’re done, take a minute and post your comments on the blog, because going public with this sort of thing can really make a difference.

Seriously…

BE BOLD

By pl 35 Comments

Focus By Doing Less

Supposedly Warren Buffet gave his pilot the advice I’m going to give you.

Now I don’t know whether Buffet really told this to the pilot, but if he didn’t he should have. Either way, it’s solid advice.

The things you choose to focus on obviously have loads to do with what you achieve, but the things you choose not to focus on? Those things make focus possible.

Watch this 4-minute, 16-second video for a simple exercise to dramatically increase your focus and your results.

To your outrageous success.

Paul

P.S., take a minute and tell me what you think in the comments. Does this work for you? What are some of the things you’re going to avoid like the plague? Watch it now…

By pl 6 Comments

10 Profitable Ways to Use
Market Research To Increase Sales

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re thinking of rolling out a new product.

And because you think you’re pretty smart and that your opinion about things matters, you don’t take time to find out whether your market wants it or not because you just know…

You’re certain that you can rely on your vast experience, just guess, or maybe trust your intuition to guide you…

So you barrel forward, invest a ton of resources, money and time into your next great idea, and…

Nobody cares.

Believe me, there is a better way. It’s called research, and there are many ways it can be used, all of which will make you more money.

One of the coolest things about the Internet is that it has taken a lot of traditional research tools and made them so much easier and cheaper to use. That goes for primary research, where you “talk” directly to customers and potential customers, as well as secondary research, where you study other people’s primary research.

Here are ten things you can do with market research.

1. Understand what people think of you. Use research to gage you or your company’s reputation among your customers, prospects, bloggers and other opinion-setters, and anyone else who has influence on your future.

2. Know how consumers compare your offer to similar offers from competitors. Think it would boost your sales if you knew which parts of your product people thought were not as good as someone else’s?

3. Figure out what features will most appeal to your potential customers. This little gem tells you where to put your product development energy and which parts of your new service should be left out.

4. Determine what should go into creating the ideal offer to your market, including price, terms, benefits, format, delivery mechanisms, sizes, features, packaging, bonuses, sequence, and so on.

5. Use research to create the best messages to sell your products and your services so that you can get people’s attention and keep it all the way to the close.

6. Research can help you define your target market or niche. Are they men or women? Old or young? Small businesses or medium ones? Rich or super-rich? Industry? Job title? Hobbies? Experience? Getting these factors right – and many more – can make the difference between a hit and a flop.

7. Interestingly, you can use research to figure out what language appeals to your buyers. Moving toward or away? Fear versus greed? Pain or pleasure? You can identify which kinds of words work best.

8. Zero in on what products or services people want from you and are most willing to pay for. It can’t guarantee a slam-dunk, but it can get you much closer than if you guess. This simple use of research, which can be anything from a 1-question survey on your webpage to something much more elaborate, can save you a fortune in lost labor, and can identify opportunities you’d have never thought of without help.

9. Clarify what part of your marketing is making the greatest difference so you can use the good parts and improve the parts that aren’t helping.

10. Position your business perfectly in the minds of your prospects. Even great marketers often have trouble selling themselves. Research can tell you why your best customers ARE your best customers and what things about you they find most attractive. Then all you have to do is tell other people those same things and you’re golden.

There’s no limit on how you an use research to dig into the collective mind of your market. These ten are some of the most important ones, and they will make you money if you use them.

Let me know how you use research, or any other thoughts you’ve got below.

In the meantime. to get you going with some of this valuable research and apply it to how you market your business, I’ve just put together a brand new product you may want to go grab quickly.

It’s an easy to follow step-by-step method to create your brand and marketing message based on information you can easily get from your customers and prospects.

If been putting off creating your company or personal marketing message, this is the simplest way to do it now and go get it done. Your only other choice is to hire me or some other marketing consultant for $15,000-$25,000.

This new self-paced program will sell for $197, and for $197, it’s a real deal. But since it’s brand new, and I haven’t really started marketing it, the pre-publication price is $67, until May 9th.

Use this code: EXRMM508 to get the discount. I want to warn you, the sales letter isn’t much, but for 67 bucks? Go get the Marketing Money Magnet here and remember to use the discount code “EXRMM508.”

Or use this link: http://www.paullemberg.com/mmm

Remember to use the discount code EXRMM508 so that you only pay $67 until May 9th

By pl 13 Comments

Breakthroughs don’t come from being reasonable…

Breakthroughs Can Lead to Breakthroughs In Everything — Being unreasonable leads to breakthroughs in profits and everything else (DNA)

Compare and contrast: incrementalism and breakthroughs.

The Incremental Improvement Strategy is based on finding things in your business that could work better and making small changes. Year after year your operations improve slightly and bit-by-bit become more efficient and more effective, producing small, consistent dividends for you and your family, and your investors if you have them.

Continuous improvement, or optimization, is always going to be a sound approach to running your business. Over time, those small but steady gains add up to solid increases in income. At 7% growth, your business will double in 10 years. At 10%, it will double in 7 years. At 15%, it will take 5 years.

If you’re risk averse, this can be very effective…

As long as the external environment remains stable (for instance, no sweeping governmental changes in the Middle East.)
As long as there are no oil price increases or surprise shortages of other critical raw materials.
As long as there are no across the board price reductions (as we’ve seen in housing over the past 3 years.)
As long as consumer tastes don’t change
As long as there is no technological shift striking at the core of your product line.
As long as there is no gorilla competitor altering the fundamentals of your market.

So as long as none of these things happen, it could all work out for you.

But when your market isn’t stable (and whose is?), when great sea changes are tearing at the very fabric of your environment, the only thing that is going to keep you in business is creating a business breakthrough.

A breakthrough is a discontinuous, non-gradual change in your business that shifts the revenue, production, and profit curves in a completely new direction.

Breakthroughs-the kind you’ll need if you are to compete with a global competitor or deal with a radical swing in consumer tastes-cannot come from “being reasonable” and sticking to existing business rules.

Breakthroughs are not predictable from where you currently are, and they have the nasty habit of making everyone in your organization totally uncomfortable.

Until 1983, Intel made most of its money selling memory chips. The company had come under increasing pressure from Japanese manufacturers, who were building significant capacity while cutting price to grab market share. Grove concluded Intel couldn’t continue to compete like this, and he came up with a new approach.

Intel saw that the future was in microprocessors, which until then had been a tiny portion of the company’s profits. He refocused the entire business to become a “single source” for computers-on-a-chip, increasing quality and diversifying the company not by product, but by geography, making it a more stable and reliable supplier.

He risked the company’s future on this strategy, broke every rule in the business doing it-and transformed Intel into one of the three most important players of the personal computer era.

Sometimes breakthroughs happen by accident, yet even when they do, it takes guts to pursue them, because the consequences create unbelievable levels of stress.

They are almost always – by definition – totally out of alignment with your current direction.

To deliberately set out to cause a breakthrough from scratch requires nothing less than a complete sacrifice of everything you hold to be reasonable. So what if profits are down; that doesn’t mean you should dump the main source of them, does it?

In Intel’s case, it did.

I decided to post this adaptation from my book, Be Unreasonable, to show the “other side of the coin” from my best selling programs, FormulaFIVE and BlueprintsToProfits, and even my newest program for start-ups and early stage companies, Getting Started in Business. Each of these programs use my “15% solution” combining incremental and breakthrough thinking, to reliably double entrepreneur’s businesses. These programs work so well because the incremental nature is easy to implement and pretty much failure-proof, while the breakthrough comes in combining small strategies into a blockbuster one.

It’s important to remain flexible and not get locked into one model. Think big and think small at the same time. Insure steady, incremental improvement and simultaneously, look for the breakthroughs.

By the way, if you don’t yet have your own copy of Be Unreasonable, get one from Amazon (They were temporarily out of stock but do have the Kindle version) or Barnes and Noble.

I’m pretty sure not everyone agrees with me on this. If you’ve got a minutes, let me know what you think in the comments.

And stay tuned, I have some really interesting promotions coming up.

By pl 26 Comments

How to make mistakes

business coaching mistakes — Don’t make bad decisions because you didn’t know any better

This is serious…

And it might come as a surprise, but from time to time, I’ve been known to make bad decisions…

And weirdly, some of my clients do too.

Bad decisions will cost you money, cost you time and eat into your profits. In the worst case, one bad decision can totally kill off your business.

Actually we all make bad decisions, and most of these “mistakes“ are not caused by a lack of knowledge or a shortage of skill. Often they are errors in judgment, caused by one or another of the basic personality flaws, the kind that are deeply imbedded in our brains and our culture.

What follows is the first half of a list of common ways entrepreneurs – and other people – decide the wrong way to do the wrong things.

I adapted this from something I saw in a quirky book called “Seeking Wisdom – From Darwin to Munger,” by Swedish author Peter Bevelin.

They say that recognition is the first step on the road to recovery. If you’d like to make better decisions and avoid some mistakes in the future, it would help to first understand how you make them.

Study the list, zero in on the parts that apply to you. Resolve to, at the very least, notice when you are making these mistakes, and fix them.

Okay, here goes:

1) Liking things similar to the things you already like.

If you like “A”, you are predisposed to think well of anything similar to “A.” This is the basis of a lot of advertising. After all, why do we say sex sells? Because we like sex, and, by association almost anything else. If I like playing golf, I may be predisposed to think that golf products make good investments. (They generally don’t.) The same mistake goes for disliking “B.”

2) Underestimating the power that rewards and punishments have on our thoughts and actions.

People are biased towards taking action and moving towards whatever we are incentivized to do, and we try avoid doing what will get us punished. As decision makers the trick is to explicitly understand the rewards and punishments implicit in the decision you’re making. For instance, you end up making a purchase decision based on the recommendation of a salesperson who is paid a special bonus for selling that product during a promotion, without considering that their expert opinion is biased.

3) Forgetting that people act primarily to serve their self-interests.

This is related to the mistake above. People ALWAYS act to increase their personal self-interest. This is fine (and to be expected) as long as your interests align with theirs. The problem is that realizing this may lead you to think that people’s actions are guided by some higher truth. For the most part, they are not.

4) Having an unrealistically high opinion of our own abilities, and tending toward seeing a rosy future.

As an entrepreneur you probably have a pretty high opinion of yourself. And just as likely, you’re optimistic about the future. Together these two qualities make it hard for you to evaluate the potential success of a project, especially one that hinges on your personal skills, abilities and business acumen. After all, you’re going to make it happen, aren’t you? How could it be any other way?

5) Wishful thinking and other distortions to reduce perceived pains.

When you are in some kind of pain – physical or emotional or financial— any kind of discomfort – you tend to act on things you believe will alleviate that pain. And your belief that something will help grows stronger the longer the pain goes on. After a while anything with a remote chance can look like a winner. Wishful thinking starts to seem quite grounded, and grasping at straws feels like anything but.

6) Being consistent with past decisions.

Psychologist Robert Cialdini makes this point in his book, “Influence.” He calls it “commitment and consistency,” and says that you’ll act in a way to confirm that your past decisions were the right ones. Deal makers use this against you when they repeatedly offer things to which you can easily say “yes,”making it so much easier to say “yes” to something big.

7) Bias towards maintaining the status quo

Most people don’t like change. It’s hard-wired into the species dating back to prehistoric times when any change meant some kind of danger. Most of us will go to great lengths to not have to change, including sticking with employees and vendors and, yes, clients, long past the time we should have parted ways.

8) Impatience – having a greater concern and valuing more things in the present, than things in the future

It’s easier to make a decision in favor of something we think will bring gains today or tomorrow than for a strategy or a project which may take months, even years, to materialize. This means a fortune-changing project can get sacrificed to something mediocre with a short-term payoff.

9) Comparing things to some random “standard” rather than looking at quantities objectively.

This one is weird. Most of us hate abstraction and don’t like to think about things without some reference standard. We’ll compare quantities, even when the underlying things we’re quantifying have nothing to do with each other. Nassim Taleb talks about a study where people who were asked to share the last four digits of their social security number unconsciously used those numbers when estimating the number of dentists in New York City. (I said this was weird.) Taleb calls it anchoring. This introduces a certain randomness into your evaluations, unhinging them from any kind of objective reality. It’s easy to manipulate people this way. Start your negotiations with a firm declaration of the true value: “It’s worth every bit of $2 million, and I won’ take a penny less.” Your counter-party offers an absolute top price of “a million and a half.” You would have been happy with $900,000.

10) Reciprocation

This is another one from Cialdini. Reciprocation is another hardwired trait, and is critical to the tribal structure of people, the ultimate purpose of which is to insure survival. We are willing to do people favors and kindnesses now, because we know they’ll pay us back in the future. All well and good, but in the future, you may find yourself making a bad decision because at a certain level you are driven to pay back the favor.

I said this earlier, recognition is the first step on the road to recovery, and understanding your how your mind works will pay tremendous dividends in making the right decisions. And making the right decisions will pay huge dividends in terms of sales, profits, happiness and satisfaction.

What do you think?

Do me a favor and post your comments below. I’ll pay you back some time soon.